The answers to all three questions above are in our latest "Freedom Index" in the January 9, 2012 issue of The New American and also available online as a downloadable PDF (click here).
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The New American's "Freedom Index" is a congressional scorecard that rates all members of the House and Senate based on their adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, national sovereignty, and a traditional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements. The index is published four times each two-year congressional term; each index rates Congressmen based on 10 key votes.
The latest index is our second installment for the current (112th) Congress, which began serving in January 2011. The average House score for this index is 48 percent and the average Senate score is 40 percent. Six House members earned 100-percent scores: Walter Jones (N.C.), Joe Wilson (S.C.), Jeff Duncan (S.C.), Trey Gowdy (S.C.), Mick Mulvaney (S.C.), and Ron Paul (Texas). In the Senate, Rand Paul (Ky.) was the top scorer with 90 percent.
Considering that every U.S. Representative and Senator takes an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, one might expect that the Congress as a whole would score high on a congressional scorecard based on the Constitution. But as the scores indicate, this is not the case, despite the fact that it has become popular these days for candidates for public office to claim that they support the Constitution.
We encourage everyone to go to our new Freedom Index (get PDF by clicking here) and to see for themselves how their own Congressmen voted on each of the 10 key issues, as well as overall.
(Past installments of the “Freedom Index” for previous Congresses are available online at JBS.org, the website of The John Birch Society. The New American is an affiliate of the JBS.)
